This is a very lengthy, but fascinating story in the New Yorker titled Angry Youth — The new generation’s neocon nationalists. It’s too long to try and pick through paragraph by paragraph, but I want to give you a sense so that you might print it out and read it.

The piece starts with a desciption of 2008 China Stand Up!a made for YouTube video that begins with a quote from Mao (”Imperialism will never abandon its intention to destroy us.”), continues with a juxtaposition of Western media outlets and Joseph Goebbels, and ends with some pro-China rhetoric and the image of the Chinese flag in the sunlight.

In its first week and a half, the video by CTGZ drew more than a million hits and tens of thousands of favorable comments. It rose to the site’s fourth-most-popular rating. On average, the film attracted nearly two clicks per second. It became a manifesto for a self-styled vanguard in defense of China’s honor, a patriotic swath of society that the Chinese call the fen qing, the angry youth.

The story then turns to the maker of the video, a 28-year-old graduate student in Shanghai named Tang Jie. Through Tang we meet a few other people (the other neocons in the title), one of whom is even the Chinese translator of Leo Strauss.

This renewed pride has also affected the way Tang and his peers view the economy. They took to a theory that the world profits from China but blocks its attempts to invest abroad. Tang’s friend Zeng smiled disdainfully as he ticked off examples of Chinese companies that have tried to invest in America.

“Huawei’s bid to buy 3Com was rejected,” he said. “C.N.O.O.C.’s bid to buy into Unocal and Lenovo’s purchase of part of I.B.M. caused political repercussions. If it’s not a market argument, it’s a political argument. We think the world is a free market—”

Before he could finish, Tang jumped in. “This is what you—America—taught us,” he said. “We opened our market, but when we try to buy your companies we hit political obstacles. It’s not fair.”

As much as anything it’s interesting to see things from this vantage point. Later Tang asserts he sees a future “new cold war” between China and the U.S. There’s nothing in the article to suggest that Tang and his friends would do anything but welcome such a war.

Like I said the article is too sprawling to give a simple, condensed, blog version — but it’s worth a read. It’s a good primer for the upcoming Olympics.